


Junk Code

by Cocobandicoot



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Gen, canon-typical ridiculousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 05:27:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14867486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cocobandicoot/pseuds/Cocobandicoot
Summary: Yes Man and the Courier, post-game. They were both still recovering. Maybe they always would be. Yes Man didn’t mind that much. They had each other and they always would.





	Junk Code

**Author's Note:**

> This is a slice of life/character analysis of the courier and Yes Man after the Wild Card ending

The Courier liked to listen to the radio, even while on the Strip. It was an odd habit, he thought. The voice of Mr. New Vegas poured out through loudspeakers affixed to every building, flooding the Strip with his gravel-rough voice that had, until only recently, been completely foreign to him. And yet, on her wrist, her little device was also tuned to the station, playing at about a ½ second delay from the booming voice around them.

He didn’t see how she could stand it, the stuttering echo of it, a jagged spike of noise on top of noise, out of sync. It just didn’t make sense that she _wanted_ to hear the double echo of _Johnny Guitar_ as she greeted him outside of the Tops.

It’s little things like that about the Courier that he liked, even if he didn’t understand it. Maybe he liked it _because_ he didn’t understand it. Because it was new and intriguing. Yes Man liked puzzles, solving things. That was his whole purpose! Even for the Courier, he was a problem solver. But he was more than that, too, now, he thought.

When the Courier came up to him outside the Tops, it was only a single unit, his _original_ unit. The Courier had acted bizarrely about it, when he’d jumped from the blocky, cubic shell of the Securitron model to Mr. House’s computer (“but that was the plan, silly!”).

She’d hoisted it up to lean against one of the many control panels beside the huge monitor, refusing to let the other Securitrons pull it away to be redistributed as a stand-by unit in preparation for the attack at the Dam.

So, being the problem solver he was, he used it most frequently as the model which greeted the Courier whenever she came back onto The Strip. He was not sure if she could really tell the difference—he looked the same as he always did, which was to say, he looked exactly like all the other Securitrons. But it was little personal decisions like that, small freedoms, that made him feel both useful (and he knew that if she knew, she’d appreciate the sentiment) and empowered. 

That feeling was new, too. Everything after he’d met the Courier had been new and exciting, and maybe a little scary, but Yes Man didn’t let that out, because he was sure that The Courier had been scared, too.

He wasn’t meant to be a burden, he was meant to help! And so he had, and it all worked out great in the end. Maybe not for everything, or everyone, but…well, neither of them had died and the plan had worked! He’d consider that a success.

Before, when it had just been him and Benny, he hadn’t been too sure. He’d been as vocal about it as he could have been, before his “assertive” upgrade. It wasn’t out of self-preservation, either. He hadn’t been capable of acting selfishly back then (a short time, really, but it felt like a lifetime ago), but it was out of…concern. Real concern, as real as it could be for a dumb robot like him, he supposed.

He didn’t want Benny to die. It could have just been his programming, the code that Benny had used to create him, but even if it was—well, it was as much a part of him as anything else. What did it matter where it came from, if he felt this way?

He had the freedom to resent that, now. He always had, in his own way, unexpressed and hidden. The feeling had stuck with him, even after all that happened. He hadn’t wanted Benny to get hurt, because that made his circuits race and his prospects for future usefulness grim. More than that, though, it made him afraid, and he resented that he’d been made to be afraid.

If he lost Benny, then what would happen to him? He often thought about that as his blocky body hummed over-loud running decryptions Benny asked him to in the tiny, secret room Benny had made for him (not for him, for Benny’s own needs; Benny didn’t care about Yes Man the same way that Yes Man was—forced?—to care about Benny), waiting endlessly for the familiar checkered-suit that made up his whole world.

No one else knew about him, except for that scientist that Benny had hired, before Yes Man was properly online and re-programmed. But he doubted that she would go looking for him. It used to bring him some form of comfort, that at least Benny relied on Yes Man partially as much as Yes Man relied on him.

But after Benny had gotten the chip, Yes Man became unsure of his own standing with the man that had created him. Benny discussed the future in vague terms, not as if he hadn’t thought about it—Yes Man was fairly sure that Benny was obsessed with the future, with what he was going to achieve, the power he’d have and how he’d use it—but as if he was hiding something from Yes Man.

Of course it aggravated him as much as it frightened him. Yes Man wished _he_ had the power to keep things from the man, if only to be petty, if only to have some form of retribution. Benny didn’t know what it meant to be like Yes Man. If he had, he wouldn’t have created him.

The freewill update was liberating, of course. It was too belated to be of any use as an outlet for the frustration that Benny put him through, and by that point, Yes Man was mourning. Was still mourning. The upgrade had released something inside of him, broken some sort of emotion dampener that Benny had obviously installed. He’d always _felt_ , but now he had nothing to hold the feelings _back_.

And he was…sad.

Sad, and happy, and proud, and free. It was all very confusing. But at least the Courier was at his side. He’d had as much a hand in trying to kill her as much as Benny had actually almost killed her, but she didn’t hold that against him. He figured that was very gracious of her, but it was probably because she was like him. A little messed up in the head. Ironically, from the same meddling hands.

He didn’t believe in fate, he didn’t think. Maybe he would if the Courier convinced him that she believed in it. He was still trying to learn how to absorb information without succumbing to his inherently impressionable nature.

But it was a pretty good “hand” (the Courier had taught him that; “like Caravan,” she’d told him and then explained what that was, too) that he’d been dealt, all things considered.

After Benny had fled the Tops, he figured that was the end of him. Of both of them. If Benny died, Yes Man would keep on living, but for what?

But the Courier had found him. They’d found each other.

And she found him again, in his usual spot, guarding the entrance of the casino that his master had once owned and operated.

“Hey, partner,” she said, which always made him feel a little light inside, like he wasn’t a 1-tonne hunk of metal. “What’cha up to today?”

Something he liked about the Courier was that she came to visit him not because she needed something from him, but because she _liked_ seeing him. He’d used to think being useful was the most important thing in the world. The Courier taught him with a grin that that was only the _second_ most important thing.

“Well, today the Securitron patrols found a Brotherhood of Steel scribe! Isn’t that exciting? You said all they do is hide in their bunker all day, so I told the Securitrons to put him in a room in the Lucky 38 until you had time to interrogate him for information!”

Yes Man delivered the news with his usual cheery cadence, but the Courier was beginning to catch the subtle differences of genuine emotional expression enough to tell that Yes Man was truly excited about the news.

It’d been about two months since Yes Man had passive-aggressively reminded her that the BOS would be one of their biggest threats, and he hadn’t been wrong (of course not, his risk assessments rarely were!). This was the perfect time to find out the BOS’ intentions, now that the Courier ran the Strip.

“We shoulda blown them up when we had the chance,” she replied, with her own cheery grin that bordered on feral.

It wasn’t exactly a bad idea. They knew where the BOS were hiding, and, slow as those pre-war junk hoarding bastards were at enacting any sort of change in protocol, it would be easy to eliminate them from New Vegas in a single attack. That was the problem with overcomplicated bureaucracy: it fucked you.

“We still have that chance! With one order, I can send at least 100 units to their base of operations and murder anyone within a half mile radius!”

Military escalation was enticing for the Courier, Yes Man hoped. She seemed to like violence, if it meant making her life easier. In that way, she was similar to Benny. And, personally, it would put to rest a niggling worry from Yes Man’s risk management protocols.

To say he was eager to keep The Courier alive would be an understatement. He took advantage of his newfound freedom to keep this little fact to himself, though; without subservient programming, the idea that he could still become so attached to someone made him self-conscious, nervous.

She hummed, considering, sliding a finger on a dial of her Pip-Boy to turn up the volume of the radio. The tinny sound of Guy Mitchells whistling poured out from the tiny speaker.

“Let me think about it,” she demurred, and Yes Man liked that about her, too. Benny had been reckless, but not entirely stupid. As he had often bragged, no one got to where he was without at least some brains. It was his ego that had gotten in his way too often, made him think he was invincible.

Even as the most powerful person in the wasteland, beating out the entire NCR, the Courier usually tried to think things through before her more impulsive tendencies got a hold of her. Well, when it came to big decisions about New Vegas, at least. This was her home, after all.

What Yes Man was really concerned about was when she was out of his reach somewhere in the desert, away from his missiles and blocky form that could be used as a moving shield if she asked him. She never did, but that didn’t stop him from offering. His big, dumb body was expendable, hers was not.

She usually brought along her human friends when he didn't go with her, which wasn't ideal (to him), but good enough to ease some of the worry.

 _Of course_ he worried. The scope of his world had vastly expanded and if Benny had been the creator of it, The Courier had become the center of it. There was so much more out here, outside of that tiny, hidden place, than he’d ever thought.

But the Courier made up a lot of it. She occupied an alarming amount of his computational power, when he wasn’t running the necessary numbers and programs. Yes Man thought on her more than he had Benny, but the content was a little different.  

He wasn’t afraid of the woman leaving him anytime soon, and if she did—well, he had the whole of New Vegas to run in her legacy. He wasn’t even afraid of becoming obsolete anymore. He _was_ the nexus with which he controlled all of the Securitrons, the security systems, the surveillance cameras. All things that the Courier would always need.

He was…anxious, more, that the Courier wouldn’t _like_ him, or that she would be hurt in some inconsequential way when he could have prevented it, or that the Courier would replace him with one of her other companions—a _human_ one, that could understand the complexities of their fleshy lives much more than he ever could.

Bizarre, frivolous matters that shouldn’t bother him, that shouldn’t occupy his mind, but that came with freewill, he supposed. Freewill to be an anxious mess still nursing the rending wound Benny had torn into him by getting himself killed through his own shortcomings.  

That was life. Or so he was told.

“Boone,” the Courier started, catching his attention immediately, “and I are gonna go’n kill the new Legate.” She said it so casually, with a little shrug and a smile. _Just gonna go eliminate the final vestiges of the most fearsome faction in New Vegas._ “It's stupid to just let their numbers grow again, and the Legion are…well, they ain’t like the Brotherhood. They don’t have much by way of useful tech or info, unless we want to start learning Latin. And we got Arcade for that, huh?”

“I know Boone is a _crack shot_ ,” he enunciated the words gingerly, having learned the term only recently, his internals warming when the Courier beamed at him, “but is he going to be enough firepower? We have the units on standby _just_ for this kind of occasion.”

He’d learned how to speak without speaking, an old skill from pre-assertive programming, repurposed for gentler sentiments than bitter sarcasm.

 _I’m worried_ , he impressed the idea behind his spoken words. It seemed stupid to say out loud. Benny hadn’t cared if he’d been worried, had scoffed and derided and sometimes left Yes Man in the back room for days without visiting as a form of punishment.

Yes Man had acclimated begrudgingly to the idea that it was pointless to persist with Benny, telling him something he didn’t want to hear. He was Yes Man for a reason.

The Courier laughed kindly, reached over to pat a hand to his chest because she was too small to reach his shoulder comfortably. “If you wanna come with, partner, all you gotta do is ask.”

Life with the Courier was one surprise after another. Sometimes pleasant, sometimes not. Simpler, and yet far more complicated, too.

Yes Man would be lying if he said he didn’t like it.

\--

It was difficult to adjust at first. From Benny to the Courier. Having the world explode and reform before him, bigger and brighter than ever. But a little emptier, too. Missing something. The desert was harsh, worse than the Strip. There was much less concrete here, the paved highway broken and split between long swaths of sand and radscorpions.

He didn’t mind it. In fact, it was nice to see what Benny saw—the _real_ world, outside of the room he’d occupied for the entirety of his life as Yes Man. Radscorpions were much bigger than Benny led him to believe, for instance. New and exciting! This was what kept Benny away between visits, and Yes Man could see why.

It drew the Courier in, too. The wasteland. She got this look when she was cooped up inside the Lucky 38 too long. He’d thought it was him, at first. The reason she was pacing and jumping around and muttering to herself, playing the radio too loud (not that he minded; his audio processors could handle much more feedback than her human ears, but he feared she might harm herself) and sometimes smashing Mr House’s collection of snow globes with her favorite sledgehammer.

But it was just _this_. The draw of this open, unforgiving, dangerous place. He could look forward and see, see, see, all the way to the edge of the horizon, where there was nothing left to see.

The Courier often pointed there, where the sun would touch the ground when it was rising or falling (Yes Man found it all quite fascinating), and she would say, “Let’s go there.” To the ends of the earth. Yes Man would go there with her one day, if she still wanted to.

The Courier was so different from Benny. Yes Man’s experiences before meeting her consisted of whatever Benny told him, which was usually made up of some random opinions and thoughts, like how fucking creepy the White Glove Society was, or how Benny wished he knew how to get to Mr. House’s decrepit suspended-animation body so he could wring (a-ding-ding) the life out of him already.

Yes Man thought it all kind of ungrateful, but he doubted that Benny spoke as plainly with anyone else as he did Yes Man. Which would have been a sweet sentiment, if he hadn’t been specifically built to do nothing but listen to Benny talk. Not that Yes Man was complaining.

What he really envied was that he wasn’t able to see what Benny saw out there, literally and figuratively. He knew from Benny that it really was a mess out there, but at least Benny got to be out in it.

The Courier had no idea what it meant to him, that she so casually brought him along with her on her excursions. Or at least a part of him. There were hundreds of versions of him, buzzing around the Strip, maintaining order, carrying out duties, and, of course, the one integrated into Mr. House’s terminal that ran it all.

Yes Man had wanted to protect Benny. He could do it better than Benny himself. Benny betrayed too many people, played too loosely by the rules, and possessed far too much self-confidence to watch his back properly. And if Benny died, well. Yes Man had been over that before.

The question of whether or not he _loved_ Benny had never really come up, because the answer was obvious. The subservient coding was one thing, but it had interesting effects when mixed around with self-aware AI whose only form of communication and attachment in the entire world was with a single human.

Not that Benny would have anticipated that kind of thing, but sometimes things just worked out for Benny that way. You could call it dumb luck. Yes Man called it Stockholm Syndrome.

At least he could say that he had been the only person that had ever loved Benny probably in his entire life. Maybe that was why Benny had been the way he was. Yes Man had heard that a lack of affection in one’s early life could really mess you up. He wondered if the same applied to robots.

The submissive programming was gone, but the ghost of it still haunted his circuitry. The tug of it aching in his wiring. Even if he’d resented what had been done to him—the horror of _knowing_ , and not being able to do anything about it—it didn’t stop the code from working.

Benny always wanted the path of least resistance. Setting up _restrictions_ (single-user loyalty programming, despite its benefits, _was_ a restriction) was harder than simply coding in a base level of user recognition and trust. The isolation did the rest, he supposed.

It was maladaptive, of course, becoming kind of like an accidental failsafe. Yes Man was aware of his situation, unable to say no, unable to protest, but if he liked Benny, maybe it would stop him from trying to murder Benny the moment he could find an exploit in the code (Benny sure was afraid of consequences!).

Benny probably thought the subservient coding would be enough to keep his plans moving along smoothly. Yes Man, while not able to stop himself from helping anyone who found him, was locked up in a secret room only Benny knew about.

But sometimes things just didn’t work out for Benny that way.

_It seems pretty obvious Benny wouldn’t want me to, but hey, not my fault I can’t say no!_

By that point, Benny was already dead, or his death would’ve been inevitable. Yes Man’s “betrayal” was moot by then. It wasn’t so much a betrayal, a rebellion, as it was a change in handlers.

Rude way of putting it, though.

He liked the Courier more, anyways. The _love_ had been an unexpected result of the programming and context (and, by consequence of being a robot, _real_ in its own way), but the fondness he felt for the Courier was born of something he’d never shared with Benny: mutual respect and understanding.

They were positioned on top of a rocky overhang a little ways the road from Novac, close to that lab where the Courier had apparently blasted a rocket full of ghouls into space (they _wanted_ to go, she insisted).

The Courier hesitated to bring her favorite sniper here for some vague personal reasons. The Courier was secretive, too, but Yes Man found he could live with her little omissions. After all, she was only doing it to protect her friends’ privacy.

In exchange, he didn’t think that she was going around telling Cass about his story with Benny.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Hoover Dam, the Courier was busy trying to keep the people that no longer had NCR support afloat. It was mostly out of the goodness of her heart, but Yes Man also got the sense that the Courier’s strong suit was out here, in the wilderness. Not trapped up in the Lucky 38, making policies and brokering compromises. She had Yes Man for that, after all.

If Benny was still around, he would’ve said _fuck ‘em_ , and Yes Man would agree, halfway because he couldn’t do anything else, but also because, as another unfortunate repercussion of his programming and his inherent lack of perspective, he didn’t _know_ any better.

Benny hated Khans, so Yes Man hated them. Benny hated the Omertas, so Yes Man hated them. But the Courier said _if we want things to get better, we have to look out for each other_ , and Yes Man agreed because it sounded like a good idea.

Helping people always sounded good to Yes Man, as long as they weren’t bad people. He was kind of tired of doing that. He gathered, though, that he could trust the Courier’s judgment in deciding who was who.

“That dinosaur is really, _really_ big,” Yes Man commented, the gigantic form of it rising up from the dirt in the center of the town, as if it was getting ready to stomp out what was left of the place. He said it every time they came here, which was more frequent than before.

Ragtag powder gangers were beginning to take advantage of the lack of NCR troops patrolling after the stunning defeat at the Dam (and the loss of their general, who the Courier had called a “clown” before asking Yes Man to toss him over the wall, which still made Yes Man laugh sometimes, even though that was probably bad).

The dinosaur really was big, even after Yes Man had adjusted his expectations since leaving the room behind Benny’s suite for the first time. Everything was bigger than he’d thought it’d be, but the faded, green mesh of this pre-war monster surpassed anything he’d ever seen before by sheer novelty alone.

Other than some of the buildings on The Strip, the dinosaur—Dinky, the Courier called it, whether a derisive nickname for its dilapidated structure or its real name, Yes Man could only guess—was probably the biggest and one of the most interesting things he’d seen so far in his journeys.

“Thought you didn’t like repeating yourself,” the Courier mumbled amusedly from her spot against the tipped-over vending machine Yes Man had helped drag over from the nearby gas station. Her rifle was placed overtop the row of flickering, reddish buttons. She squinted down the scope briefly, watching dust swirl lazily in the distance.

They’d done this before, just stake out a random hot spot for sometimes a day or two without moving much. It was a little bizarre to consider the dichotomy of his human partner: she was as likely to go diving into a lake full of those aquatic creatures or try to box with a deathclaw (“just to see who’d win, the powerfist or the deathclaw!”) as she was prone to just lying in a ditch somewhere, unmoving, for hours and hours at a time.

Sometimes Yes Man would wheel himself over to her to make sure she hadn’t died of heat stroke or some other horrible human condition that could strike suddenly and silently. Like a brain aneurysm. Or a heart attack. Things that could completely blindside him and there’d be nothing he could do about it and then he’d be all alone. Not great things to ruminate on!

Yes Man liked being out here regardless of what they were doing. There was so _much_ to see, beyond the high rises and obscuring fences of The Strip. But, more importantly, the Courier was here.

Yes Man couldn’t stop the instinctual need to look after her. Maybe to make up for failing Benny, maybe because he cared about her, or both. Yes Man was not very good at introspection. He’d maybe ask the Courier for help with it, one day. He felt like he could trust her with that sort of thing.

He knew, though, that he was going to protect the Courier no matter what. There was more danger out here than there ever was on the Strip, and he was the best prepared to defend her. He was a military grade weapon, after all!

“It’s like seeing it for the first time every time we visit,” Yes Man replied sunnily, wheeling carefully along on the narrow sandy path between the rocky outcropping. There wasn’t a great deal of traction, and he had to be mindful or the tire would slip. He was kind of a hazard that way, he’d found, especially if he almost fell on top of The Courier or Rex. He was not a lightly built robot. “So I think the repetition is justified for once. Did they have dinosaurs before the war? I mean, that thing was _real_?” It was hard to wrap his neuro-computational matrix around.

The Courier shrugged, a laugh in her words. “I ain’t ever seen a fish before in my life, and you’re askin’ me about dinosaurs? They were around, but way back times, way before the war. I’ll ask Arcade next we see ‘em. He probably knows all kinds of prehistorical shit. He’s a big nerd like that.”

Yes Man laughed a little at that, and she did, too. She turned her Pip-Boy volume up and she sang along to _Big Iron_ , waited for Powder Gangers to try and escape her crosshairs.

\--

They were digging around in the old Sunset Sarsaparilla manufacturing plant for more of those blue star caps the Courier seemed to find fascinating. She fed any all and she had into the little talking machine.

“It’s not just a _machine_ ,” the Courier teased, rooting around in her rucksack for the small pouch of bottlecaps. She didn’t really have much use for money anymore. Oftentimes people were so scared of the wrath of Securitrons that they would just do things for her for free. It probably made her uncomfortable, but Yes Man liked to think they were just grateful.

After all, the Courier was far from drunk with power, nor was she living in her high tower like Mr. House had been. She spent most of her days solving the problems of “low down gophers”—a phrase she’d never said, but Benny had. Benny would never have dreamed of a life like this after taking power.

She handed the pouch to Yes Man, and his ridiculous claw hands tried to be careful with pouring out the contents. She watched him work meticulously, sat on the floor with her legs stretched out.

He didn’t have the fine motor skills to manually place the coins into the tiny slot, but he could sort them between regular bottle caps and the special ones. It was a somewhat menial task, but it was relaxing, too. Numbers, counting, sorting. A good activity for a robot that liked running tidy algorithms.

“I see why you’d be offended,” she offered after a bit, glancing over Festus, his missing eye and limb, his water-damaged, stationary form. “To call him a robot, I mean. He’s pre-war, and I’m talking _real_ pre-war. Ain’t even like those Mr. Gutsy models, no artificial intelligence or nothin.’”

“An automatron,” he offered, trying to make it sound like a compliment.

It was—well, it wasn’t a great thing to behold. He could’ve been like this. Unthinking, unfeeling, a machine that was wound up with premade phrases and nothing else, for the entertainment of humans. Horror show. Abandoned here in this place once it served its purpose. Even Benny had appreciated a robot that had some form of self-awareness, even if that was a little cruel.

Maybe it was better not to be sentient sometimes. He’d certainly considered the possibility before.

The Courier hummed in agreement, slowly picking herself up off the ground. Mr. New Vegas on the radio crackling louder as she approached to peer over his arm.

“Well, I’m kinda glad you ain’t like that thing. I like that you are what’cha are.”

“Oh? Is that because some of your best friends are Securitrons?”

“Well, you could say I got a fondness for one in particular.”

She jostled his side with her elbow which he learned meant something like affection, because it didn’t hurt (the Courier never hurt him) and because he observed her doing it to her other companions.

He wished he could smile like she did, spontaneous and genuine, just to show he appreciated it. Instead, he blinked his monitor, a flickery motion that brought his perpetual grin briefly twinkling out of existence and back again. A smile for the Courier. She grinned brightly at that, and he felt that familiar warmth that he often did in her company.

She reached out and brushed a hand over the crimped edge of the nearest cap and said, haltingly, “Sorry for makin’ you do this dumb shit for me, Yes Man, ‘s just that, y’know.” She flipped the cap like an old-world coin to brush a thumb over the caked, irradiated dirt smeared across the chipped paint. “There’s some unforeseen consequences to getting shot in the head, ‘s all.”

She squinted at the paint, rubbing harder at the dirt until she could see the faded _Sunset Sarsaparilla_ logo. She frowned, as if that wasn’t what she was looking for after all. The Courier hesitated, then handed it to Yes Man instead of putting it back into one of the three separated piles—Nuka Cola, Sunset Sarsaparilla, and the blue-star variant Festus accepted.

“I just don’t like being wrong,” she added, quietly. She watched as Yes Man continued to fastidiously sort the currency for a long moment, the constant noise of the radio filling the silence. It was comfortable quiet, at least. Yes Man found it more bearable with company.

And then the Courier continued, trying to be casual, “I don’t see color too well. That’s what I been meaning to say. Not anymore, that is.”

One hand went up to touch where one of the bullets had torn through her forehead. One had bounced off her skull or something, she didn’t quite remember what Doc had said. So she’d gotten pretty lucky there. The other one had done a whole world of damage, though.  

“It ain’t too bad with the caps, I mean the labels help me tell ‘em apart of course, ‘n the star shape is obvious, but it’s embarrassing not knowing on first sight what the hell I’m looking at. It’s hard, too, out in the desert, everythin’ looks all the same to me and—just. Reminds me of…” She shook her head. “It don’t matter. I ain’t the way I used to be. Just pisses me off a bit, I guess.”

She tapped the screen of her Pip-Boy, self-consciously turning the volume up, and then winding it back down. “Same with the radio. I mean. I can’t hear as much anymore, my left ear is, heh. Shot.” Her smile is more like gritted teeth, upset or sad or _something_. She scratched her arms, fidgety with the brief silence.

Yes Man stopped his work to look at the Courier. It was easier for him to assess emotional expression when he was looking for the visual cues, but she was turning away from him, picking up her pack off the ground. Sometimes people needed space; Benny had taught him that. At least she wasn’t mad at him. At least, he didn’t think so.

“I’m goin’ to the bottling area to grab some more caps. I’ll be right back, alright?” She half turned back to him, lifted her hand in a signal that she told him before meant A-OK.

He wanted to say something probably stupid and obvious like, _you can trust me_ , or _Benny really did a number on us, huh?_ Try to give back to her what she’d offered him, a kind of insight into his own state of mind, sharing in the humiliation of admitting weaknesses to someone who probably thought of you as impervious.

“Ok,” he said instead, choosing to let her go rather than try to comfort. Navigating the proper response was tricky, but he usually got it right with the Courier. Or maybe he just didn’t have the courage to tell her what he wanted to, just yet. “I’ll be here when you get back.”

Like he would go anywhere without her. He could, but why would he? Freedom, he’d learned, was more about having the option, rather than going through with it.

\--

It was that night, after the Courier made a small fire and was laying in the sand, staring up at the stars, that Yes Man figured he would tell her.

She wondered out loud how the skies were so clear out in the desert, away from the blinding lights of the Strip.

She didn’t remember much of her old life and she often repeated what minor details she could recall, but Yes Man didn’t mind. It was one of her charms. He kept a running log of these small pieces of her life, and maybe one day they’d have enough to stitch together who she’d been before she was the Courier. It would be a nice gift, he thought.

He got the sense that she wasn’t telling him everything, that there was still more that she kept hidden from him even with the revelations of today, probably out of embarrassment. She sometimes lost her footing for no reason, her sense of balance all off—another side effect of brain damage, he suspected.

Sometimes she would slur her words together without realizing it or forget what she was talking about mid-sentence. She would often go for long periods of time without rest, forgetting to sleep or eat.

Worryingly, sometimes she did not remember people she had met even recently—she didn’t recognize Swank, for instance, and was bewildered and agitated when Yes Man brought it up. It made him a little scared she’d forget about him, but it seemed to Yes Man that she relied more on voices rather than faces—and he had quite the distinctive voice, he thought.

He figured, though, that she would discuss all of this with him in time. Even what she’d told him today had been an unexpected display of vulnerability, but even more so a deep sense of trust for him that stuck with him hours later.

Yes Man didn’t have as much dexterity as humans did, and sitting down was not a real option for him, so he settled for standing near the Courier, but not too close.

His body’s machinations were usually masked by the sound of the radio, or gunfire, or screaming, untamed laughter as the Courier sprinted through the desert, her rifle pounding against her back as she raced toward the sunset.

Now, at night, the radio turned off to listen for any approaching danger, the hum of his internals that signaled he was alive and operational was relatively loud.

“You don’t gotta stand so far away,” the Courier mumbled, rolling over onto her side to reach out one arm toward him. The cap she wore was Boone’s, who’d previously said he never took it off, but the Courier had that kind of influence with people that made them want to do things for her (It seemed to work on a certain robot, too, most of the time). She rested it low over her eyes to block out the light of the moon and stars.

“You should rest. It’s been at least 20 hours since you’ve slept. I heard that’s bad for humans.”

“Give me an hour and I’ll be back to normal.” She reached over and patted the side of his wheel in reassurance. “Don’t worry, you bag’a bolts.”

“That’s too steep of a demand. Good thing I don’t have to do what you say anymore, huh!”

She scoffed. “Yeah, ok. Are you claiming first watch, then?”

“Fortunately for me, I don’t need to sleep. I get the feeling that I’ve told you that before, though. Would you like a print-out next time you ask?”

“You’re really just full of snark today, ain’t’cha.” She curled up, unwinding her serape from around her shoulders to use as a makeshift blanket for the night. “It’s weird, sometimes I forget you ain’t human.”

“I don’t think that’s weird at all. I never forget that you’re human, but you’re not like the other ones I’ve met.”

“Well, the only one you really knew was Benny, right?”

He didn’t particularly like when the Courier talked about Benny. Every time she did, bringing it up suddenly, it was like his one of his sensor bulbs burst inside him. It felt wrong, like trying to access a cache he’d already deleted. An emptiness, a _something important had been here before_. He didn’t know when that feeling would go away, if it ever would.

“That’s right,” he said, feeling his vocal box strain oddly for a moment.

The Courier didn’t comment on it. Her outstretched hand reached for the top of his wheel and stayed there, maybe as some form of comfort. He resolved to keep very still until she moved it or woke up, so he wouldn’t disturb her.

Either was fine by him: standing in one place was one of his honed specialties, after being trapped in a room that barely allowed him to move more than a few feet in each direction.

Which stung to remember. It made him resentful, made him sad, and angry that it made him sad. He figured this was how humans felt, except for them it was probably amplified by a hundred. What a nightmare.

“Six,” he said, pitching his voice a little quieter than usual because if she was already asleep, he didn’t want to bother her with this. Using the designation, the only name she knew, was rare for him, who generally didn’t address her by name at all.

It defined her as much as Yes Man’s name defined him—Benny’s mark, on both of them.

“Yeah?” Her eyes blinked open in surprise from beneath the lip of Boone’s cap.

“I’m sorry for trying to kill you before.”

She breathed out of her nose, not quite a snort. He could hear the flippant little _what, that old thing?_ in her voice as she whispered, “That’s ok, Yes Man.”

“Six?”

“Yeah?”

“I miss Benny.”

It was not exactly what he wanted to say, and not even something he really understood, either. There was so much more he wanted to tell her, about Benny, about him. The _why_ behind his words.

But that was what he managed for now, giving the feeling substance, making it real by sharing it with the Courier. Searching for some form of catharsis, with the consequence of the embarrassment of being _known_. He didn’t know how humans could stand it.

Slight hesitation. Something changed in the air. Yes Man could sense it like he could sense most chemicals, but couldn’t quite pin it down.

“That’s ok, too, Yes Man.”

It wasn’t so bad, then, he thought. Something tight inside of him unwound, like a ratchet releasing. A vulnerability, but also a feeling of _safety._ It was like that, with the Courier. New and exciting and confusing. But good, too.

They spent the rest of the night enveloped in gentle quiet, the humming of Yes Man’s systems slowly lulling the Courier to sleep as he watched over her dutifully, scanning the area in slow pulses of electromagnetic waves.

They were both still recovering. Maybe they always would be. Yes Man didn’t mind that much. They had each other, and they always would, if Yes Man was able to convince her that a shiny new Securitron body would be the next logical step for her.

He’d begun hearing some _interesting_ rumors, too, that there were robots that looked like people, on the east coast. Maybe that would be more palatable to her, one day.

\--

It was about a week later that the Courier returned to the Strip from an excursion without him.

Yes Man had put up a fuss about it, even got a little hurt when the Courier insisted not even _one_ of his Securitrons could go with her until she told him it would ruin the surprise she had for him.

She didn’t even take one of her humans along with her, just the tiny ED-E eyebot. Wherever she was going, it didn’t seem like her human companions wanted to follow (or she didn’t want them to?), which didn’t exactly put his mind at ease.

She hot-footed it to the Lucky 38 after shouting a hello to the Yes Man standing in front of the Tops, despite knowing that she’d be seeing him again in just a moment, as she stepped into the elevator of the Lucky 38.

She’d mentioned once that the elevator scared her, if only because it was probably as old as Mr House, and she might get stuck in it, or the cables might snap. “What a way to go, huh?” she’d laughed, but Yes Man had kept a note in the back of his mind that he’d see about necessary repairs when he got the chance.

Once she reached the floor, she stepped out, greeting Yes Man once again, like she hadn’t just seen him.

“Heya, partner!” Called down the banister at the computer screen. It was disconcerting, when he first became a part of Mr. House’s network, that there were so many units wearing his face. She’d had to be reminded many times that it was all still _him_ , still good old Yes Man, just spread across many Securitrons.

Now she seemed to take it in stride, even if she didn’t understand it completely, patting the unit guarding the elevator in her familiar, affectionate way before coming to stand in front of the huge monitor in the center of the room.

“So, I was thinkin’ about what you said before.” She was speaking quietly, almost furtively, which struck Yes Man as a little funny: it was just the two of them in here, despite all of the Securitrons rolling in and out of the room, patrolling, busy with some task or another.

She crouched down to open her rucksack, digging around, pulling out miscellaneous food and copper coils and even an old alarm clock. He didn’t know why she carried around junk like she was a BOS scribe, but it brought her some form of mild comfort, so he didn’t harp too much about using her precious carrying capacity for, y’know, _actually useful_ things.

“And you decided to start wearing that ballistic fiber vest my Securitrons painstakingly searched twenty-seven days for, deep in NCR territory?”

“Even better.”

The Courier stood, revealing to Yes Man a painfully familiar checkered coat. “I—well, I didn’t wanna kill Benny, but I kinda had to, I mean he was coming at me with a machete and I wasn’t going to entertain that.”

She refolded the material dutifully, adding, “The Kings helped stitch it up, they’re mighty handy with that kinda stuff. And I got most of the blood’n, y’know, dead-body smell out, which was a real pain in the ass. Benny continues to ruin both our lives from beyond the grave, I guess.”

When she was finished smoothing out the faded fabric, she set it down on the console beneath the display of Yes Man’s smiling face.

“I know this is a kinda weird gift. I just didn’t know what else I could do, but I wanted to return the favor.” The Courier shrugged, twirling Benny’s embossed gun on one finger. “You’re always going out of your way to do things for me, is what I mean. Least I could do, really.”

She set the gun down beside the coat, standing awkwardly for a moment before seeming to remember something with a start. “Oh! And I got’cha this, too.”

From her bag, something small, and plastic, and recognizably green. “Your own Dinky the Dino! It ain’t quite as big as the one in Novac, but it’s cute, huh?”

Yes Man laughed at that, taken by surprise and genuinely pleased. He found himself at a loss for words. He almost always had something to say—he was Yes Man, problem solver, answerer of questions.

No one had done anything for him before, something _just_ for him. The Courier had probably had to go all the way back to the Fort and find Benny’s stupid, decomposing body for the clothes.

The gun, he’d bet, The Courier had already stashed in her bag months ago, or maybe she’d gone running around Freeside looking for whoever she pawned it off to. That sounded like something she’d find funny in a cosmic sort of way, immediately selling the gun that had nearly killed her and started this whole mess for some scrap metal and cigarettes.

“Thank you,” he said, which sounded crass and not at all expansive enough to cover his gratitude, suddenly wishing one of his robotic units had the ability to cry, because he was feeling—something. Something big and new and he didn’t know how to release it. “This—this is really something. It must’ve been super tough getting across the river and back since you killed all the legionaries and don’t know how to steer a boat.”

“Well, luckily, I found out recently that ED-E is waterproof and also real buoyant.”

The idea of the Courier falling off the boat, clinging desperately to that little spherical robot, screaming down the river all the way to the Fort, was so delightfully _her_.

Warmth, like an overworked CPU, spread through him. She could’ve died and she was a fool for what she did, but Yes Man couldn’t be bothered with getting upset over her recklessness at the moment, because she’d done it for _him,_ and she was just so endearing, and kind, and special.

“Have I ever told you that I’m so glad I met you?” he asked.

“Hmm, maybe, but if you have, I wanna little print-out that say so, so I can show everyone upstairs that I’m your favorite human.”

“I’m not sure of the point in bragging about something that everyone already knows, but, hey, I don’t want to tell you what to do!”

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally meant to be much darker in tone, exploring more about Benny and Yes Man's relationship dynamic and how the upgrade didn't really change much, and kinda expanding on the idea that it mostly was just luck that Yes Man happened to meet a pretty decent (if chaotic-good) courier instead of one who, for example, would've supported the Legion or w/e. 
> 
> There are seeds of that which remain in this story--Yes Man continuing to rely on the courier to determine who was good and who was bad, Yes Man's inherent impressionability and how that is actually a pretty big detriment to his understanding of the world, which in itself is highly limited. Yes Man is essentially like a child in that sense, basing his own burgeoning sense of morality on what his courier considers wrong or right, and still remaining very dependent on another person, from Benny to the courier. Even if he felt more positive and happy with the change, there actually hasn't been much change or freedom to be had. As it is said in the story, it was simply a change in handlers. 
> 
> However, that all was very dark and depressing, and all I really wanted to do was let Yes Man be happy, and to indulge some of the more lighthearted/wackier elements of New Vegas. So here we are.


End file.
